Over the last four years, my former team at Sun has been focussed on cloud computing, its value to Sun's potential customers, and the most effective ways to make its value accessible to developers. A significant artifact that research was Project Caroline, which was demonstrated in April 2008 at the SunLabs Open House.
Here is a pointed to that presentation.
It begins with my introduction and motivation for the project. At 5:30, John McClain gives a demonstration of the use of Project Caroline to create an Internet service, creating a Facebook application. At 34:00, Bob Scheifler gives a developer oriented view of the resources available in the Project Caroline platform and how those resources are programmatically controlled. At 1:06:00, Vinod Johnson demonstrates how the Project Caroline architecture and API's facilitate the creation and deployment of horizontally scaled applications that dynamically adjust their resource utilization. This is done using a early version of the Glassfish 3.0 application server that has been modified to work with Project Caroline. Finally, at 1:33:30, John McClain returns to summarize the demos and the answer a few questions.
While the project is no longer active at Sun, the Project Caroline web site is still running, where you can find additional technical discussions and through which can download all of the source code for Project Caroline. It's worth noting that that web site is a Drupal managed web site that itself is running on Project Caroline!
Showing posts with label Cloud Computing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cloud Computing. Show all posts
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Friday, January 30, 2009
First posting ... on Cloud Computing
I've just started this blog, and haven't had time to write out a really useful posting. But I thought I'd start with a few comments about Cloud Computing. At this point, I think the most important issue is understanding what the value of Cloud Computing is to the end user, the person who ultimately pays for it.
My old boss, Shane Robison just said on an interview on CNBC that Cloud Computing is a new business model [for information based activities]. While is certainly true, what about cloud computing enables this new business model? I believe there are two features that are game changers.
First, cloud computing, and the whole industrial move to towards delivering services, enables business to move their overall IT expenses from the capital expense line to the operating expense line. That is, rent computing and communications, don't buy it. This is certainly the direction we should be moving and we have been doing this for many years (out sourcing of IT is just one example). This, conversion of CAPEX to OPEX is hugely important, but it is really just the tip of the iceberg.
The second value of cloud computing is that it can enable great business agility, either by allowing short, burst uses of large amounts of IT infrastructure, or by encouraging and supporting very rapid creating, modification, and deployment of new services. This agility allows companies to respond to market changes much more rapidly and deliver their information based products in ways that are more appealing to their customers.
This new found business agility, perhaps best demonstrated by Google and Facebook, is what makes competing with these companies so challenging. A major goal of wide spread cloud computing should be to make this type of business agility available to all. This is a new business model.
My old boss, Shane Robison just said on an interview on CNBC that Cloud Computing is a new business model [for information based activities]. While is certainly true, what about cloud computing enables this new business model? I believe there are two features that are game changers.
First, cloud computing, and the whole industrial move to towards delivering services, enables business to move their overall IT expenses from the capital expense line to the operating expense line. That is, rent computing and communications, don't buy it. This is certainly the direction we should be moving and we have been doing this for many years (out sourcing of IT is just one example). This, conversion of CAPEX to OPEX is hugely important, but it is really just the tip of the iceberg.
The second value of cloud computing is that it can enable great business agility, either by allowing short, burst uses of large amounts of IT infrastructure, or by encouraging and supporting very rapid creating, modification, and deployment of new services. This agility allows companies to respond to market changes much more rapidly and deliver their information based products in ways that are more appealing to their customers.
This new found business agility, perhaps best demonstrated by Google and Facebook, is what makes competing with these companies so challenging. A major goal of wide spread cloud computing should be to make this type of business agility available to all. This is a new business model.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)